Topic: Culture and Society

“Conflict is a part of human experience,” says Wichita West High School psychologist Janet Fox Peterson, “and teaching about speaking and listening is so very critical, and we’re not working on that very much as a society.” More →

“They are human beings, and so they have a right to live in peace and security,” says Imam Omar Suleiman, who has made several visits to the refugee camps on the Jordanian-Syrian border. “And if we’re not contributing to the betterment of their situation…are we really the moral standard for the world?” More →

Bob Feinman of Humane Borders says he “didn’t spend a whole lot of time paying attention to the rabbis” when he was in religious school as a child. “But the one thing I remember was the Seder every year at Passover, the Exodus. We were the ones that walked around in circles following Moses for all those years. People here are walking in circles, facing an uncertain future and facing death, as we did.” More →

“We have a government now that is trying to legislate what it means to be faithful—faithful to America, faithful to a particular religious perspective,” says Rabbi Jack Moline, president of the Interfaith Alliance. “We heard that in the pre-inaugural sermon that the president was presented with, and if you don’t fit into that pretty narrow definition of what it means to be an American religious person, that has a chilling effect on your sense of being at home in this country.” More →

“We’re going back to where it all began,” says Fr. Columba Stewart, a scholar of monasticism and a Benedictine monk at St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota, “with a variety of models of Christian ascetic life, and by ascetic I just mean disciplined. That’s what people are discovering, and they’re figuring out ways they can live as individuals, as families, as loose associations of friends who find this particular path to be helpful, sustaining, and nourishing to them.” More →

His movie “Silence,” says director Martin Scorsese, “is the struggle for the very essence of faith, stripping away everything else around it. You have to find a relationship with Jesus,” says Scorsese, “with yourself, really, because that’s the one you face.” More →

“I have heard that the Trump presidency could see the reemergence of a real Christian left in the United States,” says Stephen Schneck, director of the Institute for Policy Research & Catholic Studies at the Catholic University of America. More →

“I said this to myself in the face of my captors: You have the power to break my body, and you’ve tried. You have the power to bend my mind, and you’ve tried. But my soul is not yours to possess. In other words, my soul lay in the hand of God.” More →

“There is a really important role that spirituality is playing among millennials and contemporary activists,” says Sarah Jackson, a professor at Northeastern University in Boston and an expert on social movements. But “it is a spirituality that is not necessarily tied to the formal structures of church organization, and it doesn’t necessarily require a certain type of leadership.” More →

“What defines you the most is what you do despite your fear,” says Katie Meyler, a 34-year-old American from suburban New Jersey who was working in Liberia in the midst of extreme poverty when Ebola struck. Now she runs a growing network of schools for girls and says, “Nobody chooses Liberia. Liberia chooses you. You can make a big difference here.” More →